District of Munich – Concern about the gas shortage – District of Munich

It’s only been a few days since the email from the gas supplier hit the inbox. It was a friendly request to report the meter reading. This was done quickly online and you didn’t feel so bad because at least a quarter less was consumed compared to the previous year. But four days later, the request for payment was there, with the new advance payment that was a third higher. 119 euros instead of the previous 90 euros per month. The gas market is going crazy across Germany, which makes some people look enviously at Haar, where 11,000 cubic meters of gas a year can be had for a good 80 euros a month. “We get inquiries from all over the country,” says the managing director of the Haarer municipal utilities, Walter Dürr. But looking after a student dig in Berlin never occurs to the people from Haar. You are a regional provider that is still cheap but, like everyone else, is anxious about the future.

It’s the end of June, it’s blazing hot outside and you should actually be thinking about how to get to the lake and a cool spot quickly after work. But the gas crisis and the messages that the gas suppliers are sending out are forcing people to think about the cold season. Right down to the question of when and where bottlenecks are imminent. The municipal utilities in Haar and Ismaning, for example, were asked to report the large consumers in their area to the Federal Network Agency when the early warning stage, the gas emergency plan, was triggered in March. Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) declared the second level, the alarm level, on Thursday. The emergency level would then have reached the point at which the Federal Network Agency would become the federal load distributor, deciding who would still receive how much gas.

70 percent of the heat in the district is covered by oil and gas

As a densely populated region with a strong economy, the area around Munich is an energy guzzler. And little works without fossil fuels. According to the district office, 70 percent of the heat supply is covered by oil and gas. Industry accounts for the lion’s share, as the district’s greenhouse gas report shows, and Garching, Unterföhring, Aschheim, Planegg and Pullach stand out. In the district there are largely no energy-intensive companies such as those in the glass or chemical industry, which require a lot of so-called process gas for production. The chemical company United Initiators in Pullach stands out and has been criticized locally for its expansion plans. The Agenda group recently complained that the plant should convert its power supply from natural gas to renewable energy. With 150,000 megawatt hours per year, the plant consumes as much electricity as all private households in the city of Augsburg. It is unclear to what extent the tight gas market will affect the company. The company said on request that it did not want to comment on this.

Walter Dürr, the managing director of the Haarer municipal works.

(Photo: Claus Schunk)

The emergency plan initially provides for restrictions in the commercial sector. There is little to fear in Haar. The head of the municipal works in Haar, Walter Dürr, gave his customers the all-clear: private households, schools, administration, old people’s homes and hospitals – these were the last areas to be intervened. “With us, almost all of them are protected customers. We don’t have any production facilities.” Dürr’s colleague Franz-Josef Loscar from the municipal works in Ismaning describes it in a similar way. “We have no industry.” Nevertheless, Dürr and Loscar are also facing an unprecedented challenge. “There’s never been anything like it,” says Loscar. If no gas comes, any planning is quickly obsolete. If, for example, the gas pressure in the pipes in Ismaning falls, the system as a whole is in question. “We are considering whether we will have technical problems,” says Loscar.

The gas market has been liberalized since 2006. Hundreds of providers are on the market. In the Munich area, Stadtwerke München is a big player, and in the Ismaning and Haar area the local municipal utilities also play a role. They propagate that customers can also be contacted directly, to the extent that the gas bill is paid in cash over the counter, as the Haarer managing director explains. On site, the municipal utilities also operate the 51.4 kilometer long gas pipeline network, to which there are another 24 kilometers of house connections. According to Dürr, 90 percent of the municipal area has been developed, which is probably one of the densest local networks in the Munich area. The Municipal Works Ismaning estimate their customer base at around 2000 customers.

Even geothermal district heating networks cannot do entirely without fossil fuels

Overall, however, the supra-regional providers are dominant on the market. A relevant comparison portal suggests customers an offer from Montana Energieversorgung GmbH & Co. KG based in Grünwald. The company had its beginnings more than 60 years ago as a supplier of heating oil in the region and has used the liberalization of the natural gas market to offer natural gas to private and commercial customers in Bavaria and then nationwide from 2008 onwards. Today, with more than 500,000 customers, the company is a nationwide energy supplier, where the employees monitor the oil, electricity and gas markets every minute. Press spokeswoman Heidi Frühe says it is a big challenge to deal with price increases and price fluctuations within a day. One buys on energy exchanges at exchange prices. However, the majority will be procured on the futures markets in the medium and long term. But even there, gas is traded at very high prices. Montana expects prices to stay high for years to come.

This affects everyone, including the customers of the small community utilities in Haar, who are currently still benefiting from the fact that plant manager Dürr is a cautious businessman who concluded long-term supply contracts before the crisis. But these are also running out. Of course, the prices will be increased, says Dürr and is sticking to his plan of not adjusting the tariffs during the year, as other suppliers do.

In Schmidhausen near Bad Aibling, there has been no gas since Monday

But what else can be planned at all? How reliable is the gas flow when it is said that when the storage tanks are full, only two and a half months can be bridged during the heating period? One of the nearest storage facilities, to which the Munich public utility company and Ismaning and Haar are connected, is in Schmidhausen near Bad Aibling. The store was only 17.4 percent full in mid-March. Then gas was supplied. Most recently, around 5.4 gigawatt hours were stored every day and a filling level of a good 59 percent was reached. But there has been no gas flow since Monday, fueling the suspicion that it might have something to do with the shortages caused by Russia. But the storage operator Storengy Deutschland GmbH, a subsidiary of the French energy group Engie SA, gives the all-clear: Spokeswoman Elena Hetzel says that regular repair and maintenance work will continue in Schmidhausen until July 7th. During this time, no gas will be injected or withdrawn. More than 1700 gigawatt hours can be stored more than 1000 meters underground in the area where gas was once mined. The filling level is currently at a good 1000 gigawatt hours.

Gas shortage: Geothermal plant in Unterschleißheim.

Geothermal plant in Unterschleißheim.

(Photo: Schunk Claus)

Many people now think it is much smarter in the Munich area to drill even deeper and pump hot thermal water straight away. The demand for geothermal connections has increased enormously because many want to heat in a climate-friendly manner and with a high level of security of supply. But the operators of the plants from Unterschleißheim in the north via Ismaning, Kirchheim to Grünwald, Unterhaching and Pullach in the south are also dependent on fossil fuels when it gets really cold. As soon as the temperature drops to around four degrees, you heat up with gas, says Thomas Stockerl, CEO of Unterschleißheim-based GTU AG. 70 percent of the heating requirement is covered with geothermal energy, 30 percent with fossil energy. According to Managing Director Wolfgang Geisinger from Geothermie Unterhaching GmbH, Unterhaching is only heated by one to two percent because the water comes out of the ground much hotter than in Unterschleißheim, at up to 120 degrees. A gas emergency does not upset either the people in Unterhaching, who have an oil boiler in the back anyway, or the people in Unterschleißheim. There they have a 120,000 liter oil tank in reserve. You can also burn oil instead of gas.

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